Jim is a retired sawmiller. He never married, and he has lived
and worked all over the country. He is 62 years old now and he
spends most of his time sitting and smoking. He rarely asks
questions and seldom spontaneously volunteers anything much.
He likes a game of pool, but most of the time he seems content
with his own company. Jim can be readily engaged in
conversation. He describes his life as a sawmiller and recounts
stories from his war service. He is always willing to be
involved in psychological testing or experimental sessions, but
displays no great interest in what he is being asked to do. On
first acquaintance there is nothing remarkable about him at all;
he seems out of place in one of the long-stay wards of a
psychiatric hospital.

It is only when he is asked about his present life that his difficulties become obvious. He seems not to know the names of
any of the other people in the hospital dayroom, even though he
has shared a dormitory with some of them for several years. "People come and go here" he says "it's not worth learning
their names." When asked, he is unable to give the name of the
charge nurse who has been working on the ward since Jim was
admitted three years ago, although "it is on the tip of his
tongue". In fact, Jim can remember very little of what has
happened since he came to the hospital; indeed he has almost
no recollection of things that have happened over the past 15
years. Although he watches television every evening he is
unable to name any of the programs he has seen, nor does he
have any knowledge of current affairs. If he were to leave the
room for just a few minutes in the middle of a psychological
test, on his return he is most likely to have completely forgotten
what he was doing and to deny ever having seen the test materials before. In short, his capacity to learn anything new seems
to have almost totally vanished. Surprisingly, Jim never
complains of having a poor memory. When his inability to

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